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April 07, 2015

What did we learn from Opening Day?

Drew Hallowell/Getty Images

What a great start to the season! Boston beat the Phillies 8-0, with some great pitching aided by some powerful slugging. So what did we learn? Here are a few things I saw on twitter / message boards / talk radio and the usual sources of idiocy:

We were lucky to have avoided signing Jon Lester

We were lucky to not have traded for Cole Hamels

We have an ace better than the above two options in Clay Buchholz

Dustin Pedroia is going to have a huge year

Hanley Ramirez is going to be a monster

Mookie Betts IS a Hall of Famer

David Ortiz is cooked

Nobody can remember why we wanted to sign Pablo Sandoval

Our pitching is going to be just fine

We’re going to hit the shit out of the ball

Hey, feel free to extrapolate whatever you want from one day of baseball, but keep in mind it is just one day. Some of the above may end up being accurate forecasts, others maybe not so much. Hall of Famers have off days, and scrubs can look like stars for a few hours.Here’s a boxscore from 2002 OD. We hit four home runs before the 2nd inning was over! But lost the game because our starter gave up 8 runs in 3 innings. At least we could look forward to the fact that Tony Clark who went 3-5 with a big fly was going to fit in Boston just fine (he ended up batting .207 and hit 2 more home runs all season). And the starting pitcher? Some guy named Pedro, whose stats I'm not going to look up, but I'm sure he worked out all right, too.

So, what did we really learn from Opening Day? The only concrete takeaway is that baseball is back and it’s a lot of fun. During the long off-season it’s easy to forget just what a great game this is. I'm glad it's back! Now, can someone tell me why there's an off-day already?